THE MUSIC

Buñuel de Jour

K‑18 (Finnish for "a film not allowed
for viewers under the age of 18") was originally formed in 2006 to perform my
composition "Five Kubricks of Blood" with three of my favorite musicians, Mikko
Innanen, Veli Kujala and Teppo Hauta-aho. This composition grew into a total of
nine pieces inspired by the films of director Stanley Kubrick, which were then
included on our first recording, Some
Kubricks of Blood (TUM CD 022). Our second effort, Out to Lynch (TUM CD 030) in 2011, focused on compositions and
improvisations inspired by the films of director David Lynch. Through these
recordings and a number of tours and other public performances over the last
few years, K-18 has also developed
from a mere project into a true band.

Both
Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch had been among my longstanding favorites as
movie directors. However, when I started working on the third K-18 album, Luis Buñuel, a more recent
acquaintance, was an obvious choice.

I
only discovered the films of Luis Buñuel a few years ago. I had, of course,
known of him even before that, but was simply born too late to have seen any of
his films when they enjoyed considerable critical and even popular success, particularly
in the 1960s and the 1970s. Luckily, I found a Buñuel box in my local video
store in Berlin that mostly contained later films that he had directed during
those two decades.

The
first film that I watched was La voie
lactée (The Milky Way, 1969). I
was totally fascinated by its surreal plot. Its allusions to the role of
religion in our lives were really fresh for me. Although surreal, the film has
remarkable depth. Following this first exposure, I then watched all of the Buñuel
films that I could find and became a fan.

For
Buñuel de Jour, I picked certain essential
films directed by Luis Buñuel to serve as a starting point, with each composition
inspired by and named after a particular film, rather than using individual
characters, locations or scenes from films as inspiration as I had done for the
first two K-18 recordings. "El Padre"
is an exception, as it is dedicated to Buñuel himself with no reference to a
particular film.

Music
was an important part of Buñuel´s early films, to such an extent that for his
one silent film, Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), he
created a soundtrack in 1960. For this sonorized version, Buñuel included the
same music (Richard Wagner´s "Liebestod" from his opera Tristan und Isolde
and two South American tangos) that he himself had played on a phonograph at
the film´s premiere in Paris on June 6, 1929 in front of a small
by-invitation-only audience counting among its members key avant-gardists of
the time, including the film´s co-creator Salvador Dalí, George Auric,
Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and
Tristan Tzara as well as André Breton and his entire surrealist entourage.

In
some of his earlier films, Buñuel used music that was obviously inappropriate
for the particular visual situation in which it was used, thereby creating a
counter-point to it. This made music, in a way, more independent in these films
and not subservient to the visual scenes by only coloring them as was and still
is often the case in films.

What
I really like about Buñuel´s later films in particular is that, in most cases, they
only feature music when someone actually plays an instrument or a musical group
performs in a particular scene or, for example, a radio or a gramophone is seen
in the background. This way, music is always real in the particular scene. As a
result, these later films also have long periods without any music, thereby
leaving a lot of room for imagination and fresh musical ideas.

Luis
Buñuel Portolés (February 22, 1900 - July 29, 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who
worked in France, Spain, the United States and Mexico. When Buñuel died at the age
of 83, his obituary in the New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist,
and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a
dominant international movie director half a century later." His career was
characterized by both its longevity and its amazing creativity. Still, the main
targets of his social satire were consistent: the bourgeois way of life,
religion and fascism in their many forms.

Buñuel´s
first picture, Un chien Andalou, was made
in the silent era in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, with whom Buñuel and
poet Federico Garcia Lorca had formed the nucleus of the Spanish surrealist avant-garde
movement in Madrid already before Buñuel moved to Paris in 1925. This first film
still captivates new audiences whenever shown at film festivals or museums or
by movie societies around the world, whereas his last film, Cet obscure objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977) - made
48 years later - was one of his greatest commercial successes and won him Best
Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of
Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz, who was a strong supporter of Buñuel after he
had settled in Mexico following his blacklisting in the United States, where he
had lived in 1938-45, because of his alleged communist past, called Buñuel´s
work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new
reality ... scandalous and subversive."

Buñuel was a master of both silent and
sound cinema, of documentaries as well as feature films, and his work spans two
continents, three languages and nearly every film genre, from melodrama, satire and musical to erotica, comedy and romance,
from costume drama, fantasy and crime to adventure and even western. Still,
filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of the genre, a Buñuel film was always so distinctive as to be instantly
recognizable, something that most artists can only aspire to achieve with their
work regardless of the media they utilize.

I sincerely hope this music makes people
interested in seeing these films again or, even better, for the first time.

Berlin, March 31, 2014

Kalle Kalima

This is how Kalle Kalima himself describes
the compositions included on this recording and the inspiration behind them:

The Phantom of Liberty (Le fantôme de la
liberté) (1974)

The film shows us a surreal flow of
situations, where persons in supporting roles in one sequence move into leading
roles in the next and vice versa. Themes vary and the outcome is as
unpredictable as the reality we live in. The film is built upon ordinary yet
somehow distorted scenes. A father goes to the police in order to report his
daughter missing. While a policeman questions the father, his daughter suddenly
is sitting in the very room trying to say, that she is not missing. The
grown-ups ignore her. The title has a connection to this line of dialogue from
Buñuel´s film The Milky Way: "My
liberty is only a phantom." Buñuel has said: "We so often find ourselves at
complicated crossroads which lead to other crossroads, to ever more fantastic
labyrinths. Somehow, we must choose a path."

The composition is like an autobahn in 7/4
meter passing singing peasants in the Austrian Alps. Mikko Innanen´s saxophone
sound feels to me like the ghost of freedom and, sometimes, there is a hint of
the spirit of Albert Ayler in the room.

The Milky Way (La voie lactée) (1969)

In the film, two men, Pierre and Jean (Paul
Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff), travel the ancient pilgrimage road to Santiago
de Compostela and meet embodiments of various Catholic heresies along the way.
It is a fantastically surreal journey where anything can happen. The film ends
with the following text:

Everything in this film concerning the Catholic religion
and the heresies it has provoked, especially from the dogmatic point of view,
is rigorously exact. The texts and citations are taken either directly from Scripture, or modern and ancient works on
theology and ecclesiastical history.

These
texts and citations in the film are put in new, surreal surroundings. The two
main characters often encounter individuals in the dress of various time
periods throughout history, or historical events take place in the modern
setting of the film, including scenes from the life of Jesus Christ.

The composition
also plays with time. First, there is a feeling of walking in a slow tempo for long
stretches. Sometimes, the music suddenly changes, putting the listener in
another setting where the music is based on a complex rhythmical form with
constant time modulations in the 11/4 meter. Then, the old walking tempo reemerges
and the trip goes on. Mikko Innanen plays the Maui xaphoon.

El Padre

In
his films, beginning with the opening prologue of his very first film (Un chien Andalou) in 1929, Luis Buñuel
often appeared in supporting roles, a few times even in the guise of a priest
although he had become a lifelong atheist and a critic of the Catholic Church after
having received his early education in a Jesuit school and being religious as a
youth. For me, the Catholic Church and its beliefs and practices form a strong
and dark theme throughout Buñuel´s oeuvre.

The
composition is inspired by those sullen characters played by the master
himself. There is something spooky about
the presentation of religion and priests in his films and this is also a
starting point for the composition, which has a slow and dark feel to it. The
bass line has a connection to the music of old horror films with its repressive
and repetitive pattern. In addition to Buñuel, Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy
have also served as musical inspiration for this composition. Their musical
worlds often take you to similarly surprising places as do Buñuel´s films.

Los Olvidados
(The Forgotten Ones) (1950)

The
film is a realistic, hard picture about youth in the slums of Mexico City. It
is a story of how children and youngsters living in poverty can become killers.
The film is very direct and its visual presentation is incredibly strong. Prior
to making the film, Buñuel visited slums to study the life of the people living
there. The film was a comeback of sorts for Buñuel and it was considered a
great success for him after a long period with less attention.

The composition
also has a harsh and aggressive feel to it. It is based on a hammering rock
groove played on a microtonal version of an open bluegrass guitar tuning. The
saxophone is equipped with a contact microphone and played through a guitar amplifier,
sounding a bit like a blues harp.

Belle
de Jour (1967)

In
the film, the young and beautiful Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) has a good life on
the surface with a loving and rich husband. Still, she is unfulfilled sexually.
Séverine starts to work at a brothel during the day when her husband is working
and ends up falling in love with a criminal called Marcel (Pierre Clémenti).
The film builds to a great tension, but its ending is left open as if to ask:
was it all just a dream or did it really happen?

The composition
has a sentimental tango feel combined with free improvisation. The music is
trying to capture the dreamy and sentimental quality of the film.

Diary
of a Chambermaid (Le journal d'une femme de chambre) (1964)

The
film is based on a book by Octave Mirbeau from 1900. Buñuel´s film adaptation,
in turn, is set in the year 1928. The main character is Celestine (Jeanne
Moreau), a female servant working for decadent rich people and having to do the
strangest things to please her masters, for example, wearing old boots to
satisfy an aging shoe fetishist. One of the other servants is a fascist who has
raped and killed a child. In the film, following a short prison sentence, he is
free and can be seen becoming active in the rising fascist movement. The film paints
an incredibly dark picture of the old European class society in the unstable period
separating the two World Wars.

The composition
is based on polyfonic chromatic melodies that slowly evolve and change. The melodies
form an abstract canon. All the voices are fighting to be heard. Finally, music
emerges in an evil empty space trying to capture the gloomy atmosphere at the
end of the film.

The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie) (1972)

The film
is a surreal trip that consists of several thematically linked scenes: five
gatherings of a group of bourgeois friends who try to have dinner together, but
never quite manage to do so. These fine and beautiful people also engage in some
illegal activities, such as cocaine dealing. Many scenes in the film deal with
people admiring the outer signs of status. In one scene, a couple comes back to
their own house where a man unknown to them greets the couple in their gardener´s
clothing. After they angrily throw him out, he returns in his bishop´s robes
and is embraced with deference, thereby exposing the couple´s prejudice,
snobbery and hypocrisy. The bishop asks to work for them as their gardener. He also
explains that, in his childhood, his parents had been murdered by arsenic
poisoning, and the culprit had never been apprehended. Later in the film, the
bishop goes to bless a dying man, but when it turns out that this is the very man
who had killed his parents, he first blesses and then kills him by firing a
shotgun - thus closing the circle of hypocrisy.

The composition
is also playing with various surfaces trying to reveal the spaces beneath them.
The music goes through fast changes, but there is an underlying punk feeling to
all the activities. The improvisation features an electric guitar, which is
being looped live during the recording and then played back.

Tristana
(1970)

The
film that is based on a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós about love that cannot
work in the end. Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is an orphan adopted by a nobleman
named don Lope Garrido (Fernando Rey). Don Lope falls in love with Tristana and
comes to treat her both as his daughter and as his wife from the age of 19. However,
by the age of 21, Tristana begins to find her own voice, demanding to study
music, art and other subjects through which she hopes to find her independence.
She meets a young artist, Horacio Díaz (Franco Nero), falls in love, and
eventually leaves don Lope to live with Horacio. When Tristana falls ill, she
returns to don Lope and ends up marrying him. Finally, when don Lope in turn is
ill, Tristana finishes him off by feigning to call a doctor but instead opening
a window to let in the winter cold.

Just
as the relations between the main characters in the film, the composition is
also a long arch of accelerations and decelerations. Each instrument has a solo
moment as if the story would have four different voices. There is an underlying
optimistic feeling to the music.

Simon
of the Desert (Simón del desierto) (1965)

The
film´s main character, Simón (Claudio Brook), has lived for six years, six weeks
and six days atop an eight-meter pillar in the middle of a desert, praying for
spiritual purification. After a congregation of priests and peasants offers him
a brand new pillar to stand on, Simón comes down and is offered priesthood,
which he refuses before climbing up the new pillar. Satan, in the form of a young
and enticing woman (Silvia Pinal), visits him three times: first, as an
innocent girl chanting curses in Latin and, second, disguised as Jesus. She
constantly tries to make Simón give up his task and climb down the pillar, but
he refuses every time. The third time Satan, now clad in a toga, climbs up the
pillar and vanishes with Simón for good. In an anachronistic turn, the couple
find themselves in a crowded 1960s nightclub with an instrumental rock band, a
popular Mexican group at the time called les
sinners, playing on stage. Satan tells Simón that the song that the
hipsters at the club are dancing to is called "Radioactive Flesh." Simón
protests, wanting to go home, but Satan says that he cannot.

The composition
is a collective improvisation with an anxious, halting feel. Mikko Innanen´s
Celtic hornpipe, played with a contact microphone through an amplifier, cries
like Satan calling for Simón and the bass sounds like a bag of snakes hissing.

That
Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir) (1977)

The
film tells the story of a romance between Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a middle-aged,
wealthy Frenchman, and Conchita (played by both Carole Bouquet and Ángela
Molina), a young, impoverished flamenco dancer from Seville. This was Buñuel´s
last film in which he had two actresses playing the same leading role. It is an
abstract love story taking place in Spain and France at the end of the 1970s. Terrorism
also assumes an important role in the film, which ends with a bomb explosion
apparently claiming the lives of the leading characters. The film somehow manages
to go through various aspects of life - its struggles in all different forms:
political, sexual and religious.

The composition
tries to capture this feeling with its microtonal melodies - microtonal blues
phrases where the independent voices are struggling with each other to be heard.

An Andalusian
Dog (Un chien Andalou) (1929)

It is
said that this is the most famous short film of all time. The film was truly revolutionary
in its time and has lost none of its freshness since. The film´s perhaps most shocking
moment, when an eye of a woman is being sliced open with a razor, still feels as
real as it ever did (although Buñuel later said that he had actually cut open
the eye of a dead calf instead). Although only 16 minutes in length, the film
opened up truly new visual worlds.

In the
composition, I tried to capture the hypnotic feeling of the film using
repetitive modal material as its basis.

Viridiana
(1961)

The
film is a touching story about a young novice, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal), who
has to confront the limits of her own idealism, when her uncle, Don Jaime
(Fernando Rey), tries to seduce her and proposes to her just before she is to
take her vows. The beggars´ banquet in the film is one of the greatest cinematic
scenes by Buñuel and maybe also in the history of movies of all time.

The composition is a
collective improvisation with an optimistic ending.